Ever since René Descartes, the father of modernity, science and technology have been considered “labor saving devices.” This is why John Maynard Keynes, the most famous economist of the last century, was certain that by now we would all be working 15 hour work weeks. What is it about technology or economics that thinkers from Descartes to Keynes miss?
Keynes’ prediction was based on an observation made by so many others before him: as technical efficiency goes up, we are able to produce more in less time, meaning we should be able to start freeing up our time and move towards a leisure-based society. Instead, the average work week has barely gone down since the 1950s, and more and more of us are picking up extra jobs that do not pay enough to cover our increasing cost of living. Now our devices get faster and faster, but we find ourselves working more than ever.
NPR radio brought on some of Keynes’ relatives to speculate about why the 15 hour work week prediction failed to come true. Their answers more or less boiled down to this: Keynes underestimated how competitive people are. That, and the fact that one can never earn enough. The more valuable your time is considered, the harder it is to justify taking time off from work. The first time I heard this, I caught myself eye-rolling. Then I realized that these “reasons” might sound good from some standpoints.
Rationalizations like this are just so revealing. I know a lot of people, and none of them are working more because they cannot justify taking time off because they are making “so much more.” Such ways of explaining why we work so much today ignore the fact that the cost of living has gone up exponentially since Keynes, meaning that we do not work more because we earn more, but we work more because we have to if we are to keep a roof over our heads!
My use of the word “we” in the previous paragraph was meant to include anyone for whom the cost of living has gone up in such a way as to force working more hours, not less. This is a “we” that necessarily excludes anyone who sees working more hours as a choice based on nothing more than one’s own competitive spirit, greed, or rationalizations about value opportunities otherwise lost. However, for most of “us” these are not matters of choice so much as of necessity. This split between those who must work and those who choose to work is, roughly speaking, an indicator of class standing.
Working class people might choose to work more, but they cannot choose to stop working altogether. No working class person gets to choose to go on a spiritual journey of exploration and self-discovery for years at a time. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed University to do just that. If he hadn’t, then we wouldn’t know Apple for the company it is today. People tend to focus on his work ethic and habits, while forgetting that he took that definitive period of time off to go explore the world and get to know himself. The luxury of leisure time is not one known to working class people.
Keynes, like most people belonging to his class, would rather never think about class at all. His living relatives interviewed on NPR are no different. What everyone seems to forget is that value within capitalism is something produced by workers, not by labor-saving devices.
Labor-saving devices make it so that one worker can do the labor of several other workers. Automation is simply one extreme in this overall tendency for labor-saving devices to de-skill and disenfranchise the working class, leaving only a handful of people overseeing machines while everyone else competes for lower-skilled and lower-paying jobs.
Sometimes workers are paid handsomely for their labor power, but inevitably crises occur and profits become harder to come by. This is why, inevitably, the tendency is to extend the working day/week, and/or make the work being done more intensive. Technological advances don’t just “free up time” for all. Efficiency instead tends to serve the intensification of work, the goal of which is to serve private interests (recouping profit). How could Keynes have missed this?
It is almost as though workers are just taken for granted by academics. We are like those yellow minion characters from Despicable Me, goofy odd fellows whose modus operandi is to turn the wheel of production. This is explicitly the case at Amazon, where their cartoon character representations of workers are a knock-off of the Minions cartoon:

Sometimes I received special tokens of encouragement from Amazon management, but their chosen symbol that represents us is a blatant reminder of how we are really seen, not just by Amazon higher ups, but by society at large: quirky and exchangeable little beings whose true essence is to function forever, silently or gratefully, in the background of society, making it chug along by greasing its gears and pulling its levers.
Amazon is a perfect example of how ostensibly “labor-saving” devices do absolutely nothing to save anyone labor except for those who have been laid off or precluded from the picture by almost-entirely automated warehouses. The machines do a hundred times the work of humans without sleep, and the remaining humans rush around busier than ever, hoping to not get let go during the next purge.
I’m not allowed to tell you much about my experiences there. I wrote most of this book while working at Amazon in 2022, but I also wrote a second book titled Work At Amazon. Then I found out I cannot publish most of that work because sharing details about my experiences at Amazon breaks the non-disclosure agreement that all employees sign.
Suffice it to say automation has come a long way in the last twenty years. Even my job at Amazon could be replaced by robots, they just haven’t done it yet because for now employing humans remains cheaper. That is expected to change as the cost of living goes up. If the cost of living goes up too much, it becomes cheaper to replace workers with robots.
So why in the world did Keynes believe anything else would be the case? Did he never seriously read Marx? I’m not even a Marxist in any real sense of the word, but I’ve read enough to know that lowering the socially necessary labor time to make any given commodity is one of the main strategies used by capitalists to get ahead of their competition in the short-term. Did Keynes think that “labor-saving devices” were going to magically stop serving capital and suddenly start serving all of humanity?
Despite what his relatives interviewed on NPR might suspect, Keynes was aware of how competitive and greedy people can be. He just figured this was a necessary cost for maintaining the engine of progress. Keynes gambled that another hundred years of capital accumulation and technological progress would get us to a point where “absolute needs” would be met, leaving nothing but “relative needs,” i.e. those needs that are really just the need to feel superior over others.
[Relative needs] which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs – a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.”
Bookmark this note about “relative needs for superiority” for later. Keynes wrote this in 1930. At the time he said that his predictions were likely to come true assuming no serious new wars or rise in population:
“Assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years.”
So of course, Keynes and his defenders could say that he told us so. He warned that population boom and world war would mess everything up for his progressive estimations! Not only was there another World War (II), but the United States, as the “winner” of that war, then became the global military force for keeping markets “free,” which requires constant intervention and subterfuge, first in the war against communism, and now in the war against “terror.” Not only has war become something we take for granted, but so has the rise in human population. Since the time of Keynes’ optimistic predictions, the human population did not just double. It has quadrupled.
Nowadays it is very common for people of Keynes’ class to point to population as the culprit of poverty. The left and right of the ruling class are split on whether racism or lack of responsibility is the real driver of poverty, but they all agree that population boom plays a fundamental role. This neo-Malthusianism lays the groundwork for the cold “realist” solution of eugenics, war, and potentially even genocide. I hope we don’t live to see the day when such decisions are made to dramatically reduce the Earth’s human population.
What Keynes, as well as everyone else who likes to blame poverty on population, fails to acknowledge is that “wealth” is never just produced from mutually beneficial deals between economic actors, but is, on average and for the most part, created by workers having their timenergy reduced into nothing more than labor power towards the personal profit-building enterprises of the owning and managing classes.
Keynes was correct that “relative needs [for superiority]” go up as the general level of needs get met, but what he did not foresee is what Baudrillard was so keen on: ours is no longer a society revolving around meeting needs or use-values, or even the general production of exchange-value. Instead, ours is in large part an economy revolving around the production, exchange, and accumulation of sign-value. That is to say, distinction matters more than material wealth.
If in the move from feudalism to capitalism we could say that invested capital became more important than the right to recognition and wealth guaranteed by titles and blood lines, it seems we have, since the time of Keynes, seen a reversal taking place. Capital still matters and is more free than it was under feudalism, but increasingly sign-value dominates.
Recognition is everything. This is not just true of the ruling class, or of its professional managers of capital and labor. The schooling system continues to function more or less in accordance with its original design principles: fostering inter-class competitiveness that manifests in the hyper-niche identities children form in reaction to the way they are interned and ranked against one another in artificial peer groups.
Perhaps this is why, as a teenager, I worked all summer to buy clothes and skate shoes just so I could look a certain way. Sign-value is the stuff of fashion consumerism and niche boutique identity peddlers. Even though I was poor, or as they say, “came from an economically-challenged household,” I did not work all summer so that I could get out of my material situation, but so that I could change social groups. I was not working for use-values or exchange-values, but for sign-values. Belonging is a hell of a drug.

Timenergy or bust
Keynes may have safeguarded his prediction with a caveat about war and population growth, but this is still arguably not the main reason we have failed to see a drastic decrease in necessary labor. Never once in his entire essay does he consider the fact that “labor-saving devices” are only really labor-saving in the sense of meaning less capital that needs to be spent on laborers.
Labor-saving devices lead to fewer laborers being needed to do more of the work while the rest of the “working class” gets demoted into the masses of precarious workers chasing short-term gigs with no stable career in sight. It is hard to imagine that this could not be foreseen, considering the fact that it was observable at every previous stage of capitalist development, which is why technological research and development has always tended to serve the decrease of socially necessary labor time for the sake of increased profits.
I am going to go out on a limb here and assume that Keynes was honest, but that like so many of his class, he never thought too seriously about what he spent his life taking for granted in the working class. Most great thinkers from history have been at least dimly aware that their privilege comes off the back of the toiling masses. As a case in point, look at the low key classism inherent to René Descartes’s vision of science and technology. This following quote is from his Discourse on Method, which he published before any of his main works. Having just seen Galileo get forced to recant, Descartes was holding back from publishing many of his discoveries. His Discourse on Method attempts to defend the vision, and even sell the potential, of science and technology. Emphases are mine.
As soon, however, as I had achieved some general notions about physics, and when, testing them in various critical problems, I noticed how far they might lead and how they differed from the principles accepted up to this time, I thought that I could not keep them hidden without gravely sinning against the rule that obliges us to promote as far as possible the general good of mankind. For they have satisfied me that it is possible to reach knowledge that will be of much utility in this life; and that instead of the speculative philosophy now taught in the schools we can find a practical one, by which, knowing the nature and behavior of fire, water, air, stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies which surround us, as well as we now understand the different skills of our workers, we can employ these entities for all the purposes for which they are suited, and so make ourselves masters and possessors of nature. This would not only be desirable in bringing about the invention of an infinity of devices to enable us to enjoy the fruits of agriculture and all the wealth of the earth without labor, but even more so in conserving health, the principal good and the basis of all other goods in this life.
Descartes says “our workers” while simultaneously saying science and technology would help make “ourselves masters and possessors of nature.” So the class question forces itself: does Descartes include the workers in his usage of the word “we”? For he proposes that the infinity of devices unregulated science could invent would help “us” enjoy the fruits and wealth of the earth “without labor.” Did he, in 1637, foresee the potential of automation to free everyone from labor? Or does he, by “we,” mean to designate those already belonging to his leisure class?
Gentlemen of old, and aristocrats before them, were always those kinds of humans who got to qualify their personhood through those kinds of higher activities that presuppose leisure time. Descartes’ Discourse calls explicitly for patrons to free up his leisure time, because he and everyone else with whom he associates was well aware that “leisure is the basis of culture.” Not only does Descartes say early into his Discourse that he “had plenty of leisure to examine [his] ideas” which led towards his basic discoveries, but moreover, towards the end, Descartes argues that he could likely quadruple his discoveries provided that he have “enough leisure… for this purpose.” He was not asking for money to do his research, but rather for the support necessary to maintain his leisure time. This leisure time, also called “otium,” was something he wanted to safeguard so hawkishily that he refused to publish many of his discoveries.
I would no doubt find many occasions to waste time if I published the foundations of my physics. For although my principles are almost all so evident that to hear them is to believe them, and although there are none that I do not believe I can demonstrate, nevertheless, as they could not possibly agree with all the various opinions held by men at large, I foresee that I would often be distracted by the opposition which they would arouse.
In other words, to publish his discoveries would create controversies, the drama around which would be a huge waste of his precious leisure time.
While there remains a little interpretive wiggle room that allows us to argue about whether Descartes thought the “infinity of devices” unlocked by unregulated science would make it so everyone would be free from labor, or if he only meant by “we” those who would understand what he meant by the phrase “our workers,” there remains no question that most people belonging to the few who get leisure-time presuppose the “natural right” of their privilege at the expense of most humans toiling. While most academics throughout history have presupposed this without acknowledging it head-on, there are a few who just come right out and say it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century’s greatest critic of religion, morality, liberal progressivism, and socialism too, was likewise brutally honest in pointing to the fact that his precious leisure-time came from the masses toiling. This is why he says, in The Gay Science, “A person of good family concealed the fact that he worked if need compelled him to work. The slave worked under the pressure of the feeling that he was doing something contemptible. […] ‘Nobility and honour are attached solely to otium and bellum’—that was the ancient prejudice!”
Whereas “otium” means leisure-time, “bellum” means war. Aristocrats focused on war and the fine arts, and it was on everyone else to busy themselves with the reproduction of society. The tendency of American Nietzsche scholarship is to expend a great deal of effort defending him from the broader philosophical academic scene that dismisses Nietzsche as an inconsistent and unserious thinker. Sadly, the effort to defend him as a serious thinker has resulted in a very serious white-washing of his politics.
On the other end of the spectrum, leftists like Jonas Ceika, in an attempt to use Nietzsche politically, fail to tarry with the fact that he is their greatest enemy. Nietzsche was not just against “socialism” because of the ressentiment inherent to it as a movement. He was fundamentally concerned that the rise of working class consciousness threatened the very foundations of culture itself:
If the need for and the refinement of a superior culture penetrates the working class, it can no longer do that work without suffering disproportionately. A worker thus developed aspires to otium and does not ask for a lightening of labour but for liberation from it, i.e., to impose its burden on another.
Nietzsche did not just theoretically denounce socialism for inculcating in workers aspirations for “superior culture” that would give them cause to seek liberation from labor, he actually enlisted to fight on behalf of a political party that sought to crush the levelers and reestablish the old aristocracy. Nietzsche’s theory and his practice were both set against class consciousness in defense of aristocratic consciousness, which was always about leisure-time for the few at the expense of the many.
When liberals hear me say these things, they usually get defensive and react as though I am trying to cancel Nietzsche. How ironic, after over a decade of being opposed to cancel culture while defending Nietzsche. I do not read him because I agree with him, but because he challenges “our” common sense. However, in this case, I do agree with Nietzsche, to a certain point.
Insofar as socialism has dignified the worker and labor, while being opposed to leisure-time as merely aristocratic or bourgeois, I too am anti-socialist. There is, of course, a legacy within the Left that argues that the goal of social change should be freeing up leisure-time for all; sadly, this tendency has been the marginalized one all along, whereas the mainstream of the Left has tended to presuppose the overwhelming majority, or in some cases everyone, working—albeit with better wages, representation, and maybe some more time off, not to mention democratic control over the workplace—if you care about such things.
I say “if you care about such things” because I would, personally, choose to work somewhere with no democracy whatsoever if it means I can take twice as much time off. This fixation on “democratic control of the workplace” is huge on the Left, but it only really appeals to a percentage of the workers, i.e. those workers for whom words like “democracy” still stir up some kind of positive feeling. But such words are repulsive for anyone who hears in such slogans the silent plea for ‘more time spent talking instead of acting while on the job instead of just getting it done so you can get on with your life outside of work.’ If the necessary labor required for a full income only took two days out of my week, or a few months out of the entire year, or a few intense years out of the larger decade, then why would I care so much about “democratic control”? I do not desire a feeling of representation in the workplace. I would prefer to have a life outside of work.
Understanding the value of leisure time, Nietzsche knew that a society without it would be poor in culture. A quick look at Marx’s Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844 show that Marx gets it. His fragment on Estranged Labor argues that the worker is not just alienated from the product of his labor, but also from “his own activity” which is made into “an alien activity not belonging to him… the worker’s own physical and mental energy, his personal life—for what is life but activity?—as an activity which is turned against him, independent of him and not belonging to him. Here we have self-estrangement.”
One solution to the self-estrangement caused by a life reduced to labor power is worker control. Another solution, one which takes a serious step in the direction of phasing out work as something that dominates most of us full-time, is for increasing the amount of time and energy at everyone’s disposal outside of the market. The question is, how could such a thing develop? What stops everyone from immediately reinvesting all freed up time and energy towards instrumentalized and profit-oriented activities?
André Gorz proposes that, “Reduction of work time and simultaneous expansion of the sphere of autonomous activity and non-market relations are prerequisites for transforming the physical conditions, atmosphere and lived experience of heteronomous work. Only then will its oppressive characteristics become unacceptable.” “Heteronomous work” is that kind of work that is necessarily restrictive of freedom, and he thinks it can be made less oppressive if the work-day is shortened. Gorz is aware that freeing up time is insufficient for guaranteeing freedom, much less any serious societal change.
In industrialised societies, on the contrary, self-determined activities only constitute a sphere of autonomy to the extent that what is necessary is guaranteed by heteronomous waged work. The mother who finishes her day at the factory only to rush off and collect her children, cook a meal and do the washing remains in the sphere of necessity even in her formally autonomous activity. When her work time and her wages are cut so that she has to spend three hours after work producing for herself and her family what two hours’ wages would have bought her, then reduction of her heteronomous work does not enlarge her space of autonomy. When, on the other hand, she gets enough wages to pay for necessities and has a shorter working day, her disposable time increases together with her space of autonomy. The same is true when her time spent in waged work and therefore her wages are reduced, but, in the freed time, she is able to produce more use value or change than could be bought with extra wages.
In other words, freed up time is not really “freed” if one is still preoccupied by the realm of necessity. Necessity, that is to say, necessary labor that is expended to keep a roof over one’s head, whether it is waged and called a job, or unwaged and called chores, is the true enemy of freedom.
In a certain dialectical sense we might argue that necessary labor is the condition of freedom, not its enemy, but this is only true if the necessary labor of one class is sacrificed for the freedom of another class, or if necessary labor is reduced for everyone via automation and redistribution. How can we blame Nietzsche for being opposed to socialism when, at his time, it sought to abolish privilege and dignify full employment for all, meaning his precious leisure-time would be foreclosed forever? Either the Left needs to loudly proclaim leisure-time privilege for all, or it is the enemy of every person who understands that freedom only exists outside of toil.
André Gorz is one of those special and rare kinds of “socialists” or “post-Marxists” for whom the goal of social change should be liberation from work. Gorz is exactly whom Nietzsche feared when saying that class consciousness would make workers want not just “a lightening of labour but for liberation from it”! Gorz saw the rapid rise in automation back in the 1980s, but he was only cautiously optimistic that this would free up time for all. Without large, robust, and intelligently designed social institutions that could harness and direct automation, freed up time would be immediately reappropriated to the ends of necessary labor. Only if the majority of absolutely necessary economic functions could be automated and redistributed would the sphere of freedom grow larger.
Almost everyone in industrialized societies purchases almost everything that is necessary (and many things which are not necessary) with the wages from heteronomous work. Under these conditions, freeing time will create new spaces of autonomy only if the time released does not have to be spent in the autoproduction of some of those necessities which previously could be bought. Reducing heteronomous work does not free time unless everyone is free to use this time as they choose.
Instead, whenever we have time freed, we redirect it right back into money-seeking, because the cost of living is always going up and looking towards the future we all feel increasingly precarious.
Like Keynes before him, Gorz was optimistic about the trajectory of automation. But Gorz differed from Keynes in a crucial way: He understood that these “labor-saving devices” would only be able to free up time for everyone and shorten the work week if large social institutions guaranteed our income. Not only would safeguarding freed time require guaranteeing an income, but such an income would have to be separated from the specific jobs. Such an income
“is not seen as a wage for unemployment, nor as charity for women and men marginalized by society. Instead, it becomes the right of each citizen to receive—distributed throughout their life—the product of the minimum amount of socially necessary labor which s/he has to provide in a lifetime.”
Without this kind of security against work, guaranteed during those times when not working, time freed from work remains fractured from energy. Leisure-time (“otium” in Roman and “scholē” in Greek) is undermined by stressing about how one is to get by. A dignified life, wherein one has the leisure-time to explore and cultivate talents while tending to meaningful relationships, is not possible without timenergy. Timenergy is the precondition of leisure-time, because without large-energy-infused-blocks-of-repeatable-time throughout the week any “leisure-time” we can speak of would just be time spent recouping energy or blowing random bursts of restless energy into fractured forms of time.
In order to secure and enlarge the sphere of free (autonomous) activity, Gorz insisted that a guaranteed social income must be paid on the basis of the minimum needs of all citizens, an amount determined on the basis of what is required for one to not only survive, but to live a dignified life.
This amount is unlikely to exceed 20,000 hours in a lifetime by the end of the century; it would be much less in an egalitarian society opting for a less competitive, more relaxed way of life. Twenty thousand hours per lifetime represents 10 years’ full-time work, or 20 years’ part-time work, or – a more likely choice – 40 years of intermittent work, part-time alternating with periods for holidays, or for unpaid autonomous activity, community work, etc.
This was written in the 1980s, meaning that, if society had developed with harnessing automation and liberation from work as its explicit goal, then maybe we could have achieved Keynes’ vision. Instead, the path taken was “neoliberalization,” i.e. privatization of almost all social costs and necessary labor back onto the working class.
What Gorz and Keynes before him needed was something more than what “optimism” could provide. All moods and their accompanying mindsets help us see things in certain ways while concealing other ways of seeing. Optimism, as a mindset, is no exception. Optimism made both Keynes and Gorz underestimate financialization, neoliberalization, and consumerism, not to mention how much “necessary labor” would get outsourced to the Global South, meaning that increasing numbers of jobs worked in the “developed world” are superfluous or what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs.”
Bullshit jobs go hand in hand with an economy largely revolving around what Baudrillard called sign-value, a regime under which “the apparent division into working time and leisure time is a myth.” Baudrillard is known for seeing everything as simulations and free-floating signs, giving Catherine Liu cause to dismiss him as indicative of the tendencies of the PMC who are utterly removed from the material world of production. I think what is missed though is that this is the very world he is critiquing, i.e. the “developed” economies that are based in speculation, the production of inessential virtual goods, and the conspicuous consumption of things that aren’t really needed, which we have been taught to “need” at a psychological level even more than actual necessities, have become the drivers of 21st century economies. Baudrillard shows how in this era of capitalism words like “needs” and “leisure” have not lost their meaning, but simply mean something entirely different from what we suppose.
Though Keynes is correct that absolute needs could be guaranteed by labor-saving devices (automation), he underestimated the way that relative needs, what he called the need for a feeling of superiority, would become the primary form of value. In the 1980s it was Baudrillard who had the critical eye (which Gorz lacked) to see that the gains of technological efficiency had already provided the conditions necessary for utopia, but instead of freeing up time, technological innovation was going towards producing the signs of leisure-time. Baudrillard puts it this way:
Leisure is not, therefore, so much a function of enjoyment of free time, satisfaction and functional repose. Its definition is that of an unproductive consumption of time. And so we come back to the `wasting’ of time we spoke of at the outset, though in this instance to show how consumed free time is in fact the time of a production. This time, which is economically unproductive, is the time of a production of value — distinctive value, status value, prestige value. Doing nothing (or doing nothing productive) is, in this regard, a specific activity. Producing value (signs, etc.) is an obligatory social prestation; it is the very opposite of passivity, even if the latter forms the manifest discourse of leisure. In fact, time is not `free’ in leisure; it is expended, and not as pure loss, because it is the moment, for the social individual, of a production of status. No one needs leisure, but all are charged to prove their freedom not to perform productive labour.
Thus, “free time” becomes something we expend productively in an attempt to make ourselves appear as though we have lives outside of work. If we don’t do this, then we won’t look cool—and you might remember, looking cool means a sort of detachment and indifference that is unknown to the bourgeois work ethic.
In a world where recognition increasingly matters more than capital, “having the time” to do things becomes a mark of distinction. Instead of automating, redistributing, and reducing necessary labor, the tendency of production is to sell us increasingly niche ways of distinguishing ourselves from others. Baudrillard was keen on this aspect of how “leisure” is used for social distinction thanks to his mentor, Pierre Bourdieu. In his magnum opus Distinction, Bourdieu gives a succinct characterization of how leisure functions as (what Baudrillard called) sign-value.
“Objective distance from necessity and from those trapped within it combines with a conscious distance which doubles freedom by exhibiting it.”
If leisure-time is “the objective distance from necessity” then it becomes consumable through devices that make us look as though we are subjects of leisure. This is why the picture of sun tanning at the beach becomes more important than actually getting away from any reference to clocks or social recognition. Baudrillard goes so far as to say, in his The Consumer Society, that commodities such as washing machines and dishwashers have become more about helping us feel like we have leisure than actually saving us time. “The washing machine is free time for the housewife, potential free time transformed into an object so as to be buyable and sellable (free time she may possibly take advantage of to watch TV and the adverts she can see there for washing machines!). “ Considering the fact that such devices just keep getting fancier and more expensive, it does seem likely that what we truly value in our household appliances is their sign-value, not their use-value.
It’s not just about feeling like we have more time freed up, but is always about making us feel like we have a greater distance from the necessary toil with which everyone “below us” is preoccupied. Bourdieu says,
As the objective distance from necessity grows, life-style increasingly becomes the product of what Weber calls a ‘stylization of life’, a systematic commitment which orients and organizes the most diverse practices–the choice of a vintage or a cheese or the decoration of a holiday home in the country. This affirmation of power over a dominated necessity always implies a claim to a legitimate superiority over those who, because they cannot assert the same contempt for contingencies in gratuitous luxury and conspicuous consumption, remain dominated by ordinary interests and urgencies. The tastes of freedom can only assert themselves as such in relation to the tastes of necessity, which are thereby brought to the level of the aesthetic and so defined as vulgar.
Put in simpler terms, feeling good is not something that comes independent from others. Instead of feeling good because of one’s own accomplishments, we feel good because we are relieved to be in a better situation than those who are perceived as “beneath” us. But whether others really are “beneath” us or not is hardly a matter of pure interpretation—Bourdieu’s usage of the word “objective” is meant to highlight the fact that there are facts about whose time is filled with preoccupation with necessary labor as opposed to those who feel better because they are, in comparison, free.
One way of reading Bourdieu is to conclude that “the finer things in life” are just classism personified. If this is true, then we should all feel some degree of guilt for enjoying good books or works of art. Guilty progressives these days are quick to scorn the higher arts for this very reason. This is why we need Nietzsche, to bitch slap in the face anyone who would sell out one’s freedom for the sake of universal enslavement. It is through Peter Sloterdijk that Nietzsche lands his bitch slap against Bourdieu.
In You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk calls Bourdieu ‘the youngest brother of the last man at base camp.’ In order to really feel the import of this, I will have to explain a little about what Sloterdijk accomplishes in that work, and why it is on this basis that I can bring Timenergy to a close. Against the leveling tendencies of mass society, Sloterdijk’s work is a defense of the vertical dimension as such. Verticality speaks to the dimension of height, i.e. nobility. Except it is not the class of aristocrats that Sloterdijk seeks to defend, but rather the concepts of greatness, excellence, and mastery themselves.
Throughout You Must Change Your Life Sloterdijk develops a metaphor from mountain climbing, which is why he used the term “base camp” in the above quote. Base camp is where we go to set up before scaling the heights of mountains, or where we station ourselves to celebrate and support those who are taking on such challenges. The metaphor of climbing mountains is used to develop his general theory of “anthropotechnics,” a theory about how we are the types of creatures who get meaning from taking on challenges.
“By [anthropotechnics] I mean the methods of mental and physical practising by which humans from the most diverse cultures have attempted to optimize their cosmic and immunological status in the face of vague risks of living and acute certainties of death.”
This tendency towards self-optimization that takes on tremendous risks to accomplish acrobatic feats is a condition of living a meaningful life, but all Bourdieu sees is class differentiation. This is the necessary context for understanding Sloterdijk’s “dunk” on Bourdieu:
He is the human at the base camp who acts as if it were the goal of the expedition. For him, the journey upwards is over before it has begun. This youngest brother of the last human has been drastically shown that whatever distinctions he might acquire are never more than supplements to the habitus, pseudo-vertical differentiations within the camp population.
Sloterdijk sees in Bourdieu that tendency of every self-hating person of privilege, the guilty sense that any and all marks of distinction are necessarily at the expense of others and never truly great on their own count. If this is true, then all of the finer things are only finer because of the time required to enjoy them, meaning that enjoying certain things shows the sign-value of being a person who has disposable leisure-time. As Bourdieu says,
the consumer helps to produce the product he consumes, by a labour of identification and decoding which, in the case of a work of art, may constitute the whole of the consumption and gratification, and which requires time and dispositions acquired over time.”
In other words, high art is made for people who have super refined tastes for art, what Catherine Liu would call a form of virtue hoarding. Though Bourdieu is onto something, he overstates his case. As Sloterdijk puts it, “What Bourdieu calls the class society is a base camp where all ascents take place internally, while ascents to external goals are strictly ruled out.” I say this bitch-slap to Bourdieu is done by Nietzsche through Sloterdijk because Sloterdijk is, as Daniel Tutt points out in his new book, a Nietzschean.
What’s the matter with being a Nietzschean? Let’s get to that question through another first: What is it that Sloterdijk, as a Nietzschean, is apparently unable to see? We cannot answer this question without giving credit to Nina Power, who first caught my attention with the amazing forward she wrote for an anthology of essays in defense of a leisure society called Why Work? In 2014, Power wrote a book review of You Must Change Your Life, wherein she makes the point clear:
In a bid to shore up this idea of a kind of permanent and productive hierarchy in all cultural realms, as well as in the physical and psychic order, Sloterdijk describes the possibility that ‘the inequality between humans might be due to their asceticisms, their different stances towards the challenges of the practising life’. In this way he avoids any kind of natural division, but this idea of unequal practices – an idea he claims ‘has never been formulated in the history of investigations into the ultimate causes of difference between humans’ – does not seem to get us much further as an explanation or as a solution to humanity’s problems.
So while on the one hand Sloterdijk sidesteps “natural divisions” between people (on the basis of race, gender, ability, etc.) he nonetheless naturalizes class differences. This is done by acting like the only real difference between you, me, and Jeff Bezos, is the “asceticisms” we choose. We all have our own ways of “scaling mount improbable” (his central metaphor for taking on incredible challenges), whether it be skateboarding, tight-rope walking, or running Amazon. We could call this “ascetic relativism.”
Power’s criticism of Sloterdijk is that, in all his striving to understand differences between humans, he never even touches on the most important problems faced by humanity, much less potential solutions to those matters. According to her, those are:
How possible is it for people to develop different ways of ‘practising life’ if the burdens placed upon them by financial need require them to spend most of their time working, say, or taking care of others? If Sloterdijk comes across as defending the kind of life that we might associate with an elite, educated class who have time for contemplation and self-improvement, this appears to be no accident…
Sloterdijk’s “ascetic relativism” naturalizes class differences by erasing the fact that the overwhelming majority of people on this planet don’t get to choose their asceticisms (practical challenge activities undertaken) outside of work. Taking on whatever challenges you want with relative timenergy is only a choice if you have special opportunities, or were born into power, but even then, this presupposes everyone else’s timenergy being reduced to labor power in the background to foreground your own self-actualization projects.
As Power says, Sloterdijk coming across like he is defending the elite “appears to be no accident.” We can say that, because Sloterdijk is a Nietzschean, it is indeed no accident, thanks to Daniel Tutt’s new work. How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche is an important intervention in the leftist media scene wherein the sanitized liberal Nietzsche is being “synthesized” with Marx. Take for example Jonas Čeika’s recent work titled How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle. Čeika argues that Nietzsche and Marx can be productively read alongside one another as great critics of liberal and bourgeois morality. Considering the fact that bourgeois moralizing is such a problem for today’s Left, surely Nietzsche has something to offer as an antidote.
The problem with such appropriations of Nietzsche is they never, as Hegel says, “tarry with the negative.” The question is not whether or not to read Nietzsche, but how to read him: As a friend and co-conspirator, or as someone who is one’s own best critic? Of these two options I argue for the latter, whereas Tutt proposes a third approach: reading Nietzsche as a parasite, which means (my emphases):
with careful attention both to the existential philosophical system meant to retain a particular form of hyper individualism bound up with a particular conception of aesthetic or artistic suffering and as a refined political thinker who sought to offer up a praxis for intellectuals to fend off egalitarian and socialist politics from below.
The point is not to cancel Nietzsche. As Tutt says,
This parasitical reading is not a reading of full abolition or cancellation, it is a method of working through, of dialectically retaining and preserving what he offers as we approach him head on, with clear eyes, and without illusions.
While I agree with this wholeheartedly, the only thing I think this decidedly “leftist in-group reifying reading” fails to ever consider is the fact that Nietzsche was, for his time, more or less correct: Levelling was never a solution to class inequality. Timenergy or bust proposes a shocking counter to Tutt’s reading: Better slavery of the many for the sake of the few than universal slavery for all!
This does not mean Nietzsche is a friend of the working class or of those of us from a blue collar background who have found inspiration from his ideas. The quotes that I have already shared in this book alone should be more than enough to demonstrate that Nietzsche is not our friend. He doesn’t give a fuck about us getting our timenergy. Nietzsche would say to give up hope and get back to work, or, if we really want freedom from necessity, then it will have to come from enslaving the Third World (I’m not even kidding, and will show it below).
Reading Nietzsche as neutral on issues related to the distribution of labor and timenergy in society is a tremendous mistake.
This mistake was most recently made in How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle, a popular work that reads Marx and Nietzsche together (something I have also always been an advocate of doing). This is easily accomplished when reading them on one’s own terms, instead of on the author’s. Supposedly subversive “death of the author” readings have been popular since Barthes, but this failure to own up to thinking through the real stated agenda and biases of an author, much less the author’s historical context, lends itself to all kinds of problems (many of which Tutt points out wonderfully throughout his work!). It is always easier to find what you like from any given author while ignoring or excusing the rest. Against such tendencies is the practice of sitting with and working through contradictions. This is essential to any genuine intellectual project.
Though Marx and Nietzsche were both well aware that real leisure time is the basis of all qualified culture, Nietzsche sought to hoard it for the few at the expense of the many, whereas Marx sought to expand access to timenergy for everyone. Even in his mature work, Marx still asserts that the only thing that really distinguishes the worker from the slave is “the worker’s participation in the higher… cultural satisfactions, the agitation for his own interests, newspaper subscriptions, attending lectures, educating his children, developing his taste etc.” Against such a view, Nietzsche knew relative freedom from necessity would only ignite a taste for liberation from work itself within the working class as a whole. Let’s revisit the quote I shared earlier, but this time with its shocking second half:
If the need for and the refinement of a superior culture penetrates the working class, it can no longer do that work without suffering disproportionately. A worker thus developed aspires to otium and does not ask for a lightening of labour but for liberation from it, i.e., to impose its burden on another. One could perhaps think of satisfying his desires and massively introducing barbaric Asian and African populations, so that the civilized world continues to use the services of the uncivilized world, and thus nonculture would be considered precisely to be a sort of corvée.
A corvée is the tax serfs paid to their feudal lords. Nietzsche is saying that the only way to satisfy the desire of working people for liberation from work would be the enslavement of Asian and African people. To some degree, consumerism in the first world has been predicated on little else. Us workers in the U.S., exploited as can be, nonetheless stand to gain (in the short-term) from capitalist imperialism that has reduced entire countries to producing nothing more than coffee, chocolate, or rare earth minerals for our smartphones and electric cars.
This aspect of Nietzsche, as Tutt argues, should be the most relevant for anyone who cares about a future wherein most don’t toil for the luxury and leisure of the few. Most of Nietzsche’s seemingly non-political concepts were designed deliberately to foil working class consciousness. Because Daniel Tutt shows us this a couple of years after Jonas Čeika’s popular work that argues the Left should use Nietzsche, it seems like the two have a lot to learn from one another. We could all benefit from seeing that conversation take place, which is why I have tried to arrange it (to no avail). Čeika must be too busy to see my emails that have, a few times over the last year and a half, tried to arrange this conversation. I want to see Tutt and Čeika flesh out the contradictions and tarry with the negative—how else is learning, which is dialectical, to take place?
Though I think leftists like Čeika have a lot to learn from leftists like Tutt about the inherently classist thread throughout Nietzsche’s project, I also think Tutt sets the stage for many to fall into an easy trap. It is almost as easy to appropriate asshole Nietzsche as it is to appropriate his sanitized version. After reading Tutt’s work it will be easy for leftists to say, “What a jerk! I am against slavery! Let’s rid ourselves of both Nietzsche and a class society!” But this once again flees from genuine contradiction.
Tarrying with the negative means, in this case, sitting with the awful feeling that Nietzsche is actually onto something. This is a very dangerous maybe.
At least Nietzsche owns up to the reality of the situation. Unlike Sloterdijk, Nietzsche comes right out and tells us what the objective situation is, taking the side of the parasites rather than the easy way out.
We can always trust Nietzsche to refuse the cheap escape route of lofty platitudes about universal freedom used by the likes of Thomas Jefferson who said a lot of words about freeing slaves but then never freed his own. And while we like to sit back and consider ourselves superior to the likes of both Jefferson and Nietzsche, we nonetheless call them out or write them off as “problematic” from our devices, which are made by modern day slaves. How convenient.
On the one side, we need Nietzsche to bitch slap Bourdieu for forgetting there is a real dimension of height that is not just inward attempts at classist distinction, and on the other, we need Bourdieu to remind us that almost everything we’ve ever enjoyed came at the expense of others who are objectively closer to, or dominated by, necessity. Not just so that we can be conscious of the situation we are in, but so that we do not fall for the optimistic vision of either Keynes or Gorz.
Remember when I said to bookmark that Keynes quote about “relative needs for superiority”? His mistaken assumption was that, as technology developed to guarantee and make most efficient the satisfaction of our universal “absolute needs” (from necessity, toil, starvation, shelter, etc.) that we would more or less solve the survival question. Of course this would leave for the rest of human time the struggle for recognition, but with absolute needs taken care of, such struggles could be waged on their own terms, without the stakes of life or death currently posed on working people by the economy.
Keynes, like Gorz, underestimated the ways in which technological innovations would be hijacked by the profit motive to serve relative needs for superiority and increased capital accumulation at the expense. In a sense, they failed to consider the rise and continued relevance of the progressive PMC, and its lust for, not power or wealth, but recognition and influence.
Tutt shares a useful quote by Trotsky in this regard, but first, who was Trotsky? Trotsky was one of Lenin’s revolutionary co-conspirators, the guy who organized and led The Red Army and, among various arguably good things, also was largely responsible for the murder of striking workers whose interests he purported to represent (as in “the Kronstadt rebellion”). Trotsky is generally appreciated for his harsh criticism of Stalin, though as Mattick and Kolokowski are good for showing, almost anything bad Stalin did, Trotsky either did do as well, or else he would have done so if he had been in the position of power during the USSR’s height of power and subsequent downfall. I wouldn’t feel the need to say this if it wasn’t for the uncritical usage of Trotsky that has become a norm.
Nonetheless, the quote by Trotsky that Tutt shared is instructive for thinking about how the PMC, in its thirst for recognition and influence, becomes so easily duped by a simplistic appropriation of Nietzsche (emphases my own):
Trotsky published his first major article in 1900, “On the Philosophy of the Superman.” Written in part to mark the occasion of Nietzsche’s death, in it Trotsky points out that Nietzsche’s philosophy of radical individualism did not only appeal to the bourgeoisie or to the men of Wall Street and high finance. Trotsky pinpoints the problem of Nietzsche for working-class politics when he notes that Nietzsche “became the ideologue of a group living like a bird of prey at the `expense of society, but under conditions more fortunate than those of the miserable lumpenproletariat: they are a parasitenproletariat of a higher caliber.”36 Trotsky identifies a particular deleterious class formation that emerges as the chief expositor of the Nietzschean philosophy, a class formation which was unconsciously furthering a bourgeois, heroic, individualist conception of themselves — influenced by Nietzsche’s thought—while at the same time appealing to a socialist movement and its values.
When the professionals and managers of capital, the ideological representatives belonging to the media caste, read Nietzsche, it doesn’t matter if their politics are left or right, they are seduced by the idea of politics “from above.” They don’t just feel a “relative need for superiority,” but feel obligated to take on the responsibilities of paternalistic representatives. The most essential difference between left and right becomes liberal cultural values vs. conservative ones, while the mode, role, and function they maintain in the reproduction of our futureless society continues unabated.
Whether embodying the open-minded mommy vibe or playing out the stern father figure role, the left and right sides of the PMC both buy into Nietzsche’s pathos of distance, which he described as “the will to be yourself, to stand out.” Doing so is impossible when bogged down in toil. Once relatively freed from necessity, the PMC’s approximately freed timenergy is directed towards the kinds of diets, reading habits, language games, and cultural value arguments that make up the bread and butter of Democrat vs. Republican culture war “issues” we are supposed to take so seriously.
This freed up timenergy is thus used, not for scholē (genuinely self-directed exploration and creativity), but sign-value that represents having done those kinds of things to qualify oneself as deserving. This is also what Bourdieu called cultural and social capital, meaning that the relative timenergy freed from preoccupation with socially necessary toil gets invested in looking like you know important things and people, that you belong to the anointed in-group of ones deserving representative or gatekeeper roles. Lifestyle consumerism thus takes on the flourish of “social justice” or “traditional values”—both fitting in perfect to what Catherine Liu calls virtue hoarding.
There is an inevitable response that must be preempted here and now: “But Dave, stop it with this PMC stuff, acting like the PMC is so privileged with relative timenergy! It’s not! We’re so stressed! Nothing but busywork bullshit all day every day, and we have asshole managers to deal with too. You act like we’re living in the lap of luxury!” Admittedly this is true. As Barbara and John Ehrenreich, the authors who coined the term “PMC” in the first place pointed out in their third article on the topic: The PMC is becoming more precarious by the day. They, as well as Elton L.K. in his piece “The Vampire Castle is PMC,” all agree that this increased precarity should create more common cause between the PMC and the broader working class. Though that is what I would like to see, I believe the opposite is happening.
Even if increased precarity creates the potential for more common cause, denial of the historic role, material function, and recurrent tendencies and mode unique to the PMC will undermine that potential by supercharging the objective class antagonisms, not defusing them. The PMC has always been optimistic about technology, the direction of capital (whether that direction is towards more capitalism or some inevitable socialism), and automation. Both sides likewise are optimistic in their ability to properly represent the real interests of workers.
We have to be cautious against techno optimism. We have to be skeptical when anyone is saying lofty-sounding platitudes about solidarity and freedom. And when it comes to the PMC becoming more precarious, we should not for one second “trust” that this creates common cause to liberate all of us from toil.
Instead of increased common cause, what we see are only more severe forms of gatekeeping and goalpost moving. Cancel culture and rumor campaigns to unperson people are not going to go away, but only get worse, as competitiveness over those few remaining good PMC jobs heightens “the fear of falling.”
The witch hunts carried out against principled women who believe what the overwhelming mass majority of humans on this planet also happen to believe, that a woman is, in part, defined by unique experiences related to her biology, are only the beginning. This is a big part of why I still engage with and want to include Nina Power. This is why I built a platform that can allow contradictions such as these to play themselves out while the rest of the platforms do everything they can to keep people siloed in their comfort-zones.
It would be nice to ignore the mass silencing that has taken effect in the last seven years, but for anyone who sees the direction societal development is taking, this cannot be ignored. That is why I allowed the disagreement between Tutt and Power to play itself out when she intervened during an interview with Tutt about leisure. It is also why, in that conversation, I may have appeared to side with Power. Tutt says he chose not to publish his interview with her because of pressure put on him by “the trans community.” But there is no such thing as a trans totality. There are only spokespeople who invoke this abstract and totalized “community” in an attempt to coerce others via epistemological gaslighting and social blackmail. Regardless of what you or I “believe” about what is or is not a woman, the most dangerous thing happening right before our eyes is the wholesale denouncement, harassment, and stigmatizing of anyone who happens to hold the common sense, classical, or traditional view.
I say this is the most dangerous thing because the collapse of capitalism and proliferation of automation is not ushering in a socialist reality, but barbarism. Putting nice words over reality and using people’s preferred pronouns won’t make it any less barbaric so long as the enforcers of these norms are given free license to punish those who do not comply.
In this situation, some of those fighting to secure themselves precious titles (respected brands) within the new feudal society will do so while calling themselves socialists, progressives, or Democrats, just as they might call themselves traditionalists, libertarians, or conservatives. It doesn’t matter! They’re fighting to maintain the relative timenergy privilege necessary to maintain their pathos of distance, regardless of whether the things they say are open minded, nice, or not. Insofar as we buy into their rationalization of this ascriptive hierarchy as opposed to that, we nonetheless buy into the meritocratic division of “labor” that their divides naturalize.
Against the “intersectional” logic that says one must have the correct position on every relevant issue in order to be “deserving” of having access to civic spaces or representative roles, I believe we need to be timenergy reductionists.
Wokeness, traditional values, and everything else the gatekeepers and goal-post movers come up with to rationalize their “deservingness” can be correct one day and wrong the next. These are Victorian Table Manners with fancy words and irrational logics instead of different kinds of spoons and forks. This is the moving around of seats on the Titanic as it sinks. The PMC of both sides is at base camp tweeting the signs of being the real deal climbers of mount improbable. Watch them do the Nietzsche at the dance party at the end of the world! So unique! So courageous! So excellent! Amore Fati!
We cannot allow ourselves to be seduced by someone who is good at saying all the right things about every relevant topic. Even if one knows the “correct” stance to take on whatever the issue of the moment might be, we must defend the right to be wrong, while keeping in mind that we ourselves might be the ones who are wrong. Above and beyond correctness is the fact that every issue, position, and declaration can be simulated, performed, and turned into a caricature of itself—easily coopted by the spectacle that will sell it right back to us for the curation of our defensive identities. Timenergy for all, on the other hand, cannot be simulated and sold back to us. The closest capitalism has come is, as Baudrillard pointed out earlier, giving us this sense that commodities such as the dishwasher can “save” us time and therefore embodies leisure. “Timenergy” as a concept breaks the ruse. Actually existing capitalism and socialism have both boasted of providing rights, goods, and services to their citizenry, but neither has ever proven capable of freeing what we need the most if we are to ever win substantial freedom: Timenergy! This is why I say, “Timenergy or bust!”

In close
We may have achieved Descartes’ dream of “an infinity of devices,” but we have never been further from those devices actually liberating us from our enslavement to our full-time preoccupation with necessity.
Timenergy is the precondition of what gets qualified as labor power, which has for 2,500 years served the needs of power while maintaining a little bubble of leisure, otium, and scholē for a few privileged souls. Simply saying, “leisure for all!” or “I’m against a class society” has proven to mean little beyond what it signals as a form of sign-value itself. Such sloganeering will not fundamentally alter anything about reality when everyone understands leisure as time freed for recouping energy to go back to work, or in the sense of the conspicuous consumption of “leisure” as sign-value.
Even if God came down to Earth and commanded every social and private institution to reduce the work week to less than 3 days per week, we would not change our lives—not without an understanding that “time” and “energy” remain worthless when fractured. Any hope for a genuine kind of freedom worth fighting to win must necessarily free up timenergy from its current domination by regimes of labor power.
Thankfully Nietzsche need not be correct in our time, i.e. the only way for working class people to get liberation is not at the expense of the so-called “barbaric” people. Rather than remaining slaves forever, or making other people slaves so that we can be free at their expense, automation and A.I. show a way forward. But even this is not a sufficient condition for a plausible or preferable future.
Questions about political policies or technical innovation, much less revolution vs. reform, fail to address the fundamental issue, which is conceptual. The concept, which gets to the heart of the problem and paves the way forward, is timenergy. With it, we are able to understand why our “free time” is really just garbage time. More importantly, timenergy theory shows us why so many of the goals we set for ourselves are doomed to failure. Without timenergy we cannot truly appreciate those finer arts, or explore and cultivate our talents for their own sake, much less for the sake of others or any kind of higher community or culture. With it, we can do anything!